Instant Coffee

DEAR SOS: The Regent of Fiji in Nadi, Fiji, serves an excellent vegetable curry I'd love to make at home. Can you get a recipe? --LAURA DEAR LAURA: This recipe makes a good dish for the holidays and works at either a buffet or sit-down dinner party. If you want to simplify the recipe, you can omit the puff pastry crust.

July 31, 2011 | By Jeannine Stein, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog

Caffeine--some people can't live with it, and others can't live without it. Join a live Web chat on Monday, Aug. 1, at 11 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. CT, 2 p.m. EST) and learn how this substance can affect your body, your health and your athletic performance. Chatting with readers will be registered dietitian Ruth Frechman, spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Assn. and author of the upcoming book "The Food Is My Friend Diet. " Frechman is also the founder of "On the Weigh," a nutrition consulting business, as well as an American Council on Exercise certified personal trainer.

Coffee prices continue to get easier to swallow. Kraft Foods Inc., which owns the Maxwell House and Yuban brands of packaged coffees, is lowering its wholesale prices roughly 6%. The cut will shave about 20 cents off each pound of the company's roast and ground coffees, while making instant coffee about 2 cents cheaper per ounce. Retailers such as grocery stores will set the final price seen by consumers. Kraft's price cut, announced Tuesday, follows that of competitor J.M. Smucker, which a week ago slashed the cost of its Dunkin' Donuts and Folgers packaged lines 6% because of a drop in coffee bean prices.

Starbucks Corp.says it plans to sell a single-cup coffee machine for consumers to brew coffee and espresso at home, entering a market long dominated by Keurig Inc. The Seattle-based coffee chain says it will start selling the Verismo machines this fall. It has not yet released pricing for the Verismo. Starbucks first entered the single-serve coffee market with its Via Ready Brew instant coffee in 2009, and it launched its K-cup packs for Keurig single-cup machines in November.

Having watched Starbucks Corp. elbow out its Cafe Sarks brand on grocery store shelves, executives at Nestle USA knew it was time to wake up and sell some coffee. The Glendale-based company is replacing Sarks with a new gourmet coffee and specialty coffee beverage line in Western states, under the 62-year-old Nescafe label.

Quitting is easy, maintaining is hard. Dignity, as a coffee drinker, that is. All the time you hear it. You're minding your business when some condescending highway patrolman pulls you over and asks you if you know how fast you were going. "I have no idea officer; I am in a hurry. I've got to pick up my triple grande caramel macchiato before heading off to work, and I'm really going to be late now. . . ." Honestly. They've gotta know the feeling.

King Arthur and his knights searched for years for the Holy Grail. And I have searched for a good cup of decaffeinated coffee. My husband, Chuck, says, "How can you decide what's a good cup of coffee? Everyone likes it a different way. You like your coffee twice as strong as the rest of the world." He's probably right. But since "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder," a good cup of coffee for me is determined in my taste buds. It isn't as though I haven't tried.

Read this article or we'll turn you into something vile, slithery and disgusting . . . such as a congressman. And don't think this is an idle threat, bub. We recently received--just in time for Halloween--two new books on casting spells.

Blue waters shimmer in the background. A couple, dressed in crisp summer whites and sharing a wicker lounge chair, are caught in a private moment. "It's wonderful to get away from civilization," he says. "I wonder if I can use my credit cards," she wonders. Is it an advertisement for clothes or some vacation place? Neither. It's a magazine ad for coffee. The only sign of the beverage, though, are the coffee mugs the couple hold.